Project Management Perspectives

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor designed to produce a unique product, service or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the constraints on scope, time, quality and cost. Projects need to be managed to meet their objectives, which are defined in terms of expectations of time, cost, and quality.

For example, Project Scope: To move the organization's head office to another location. Its requirements are:

• Time: Complete by March 2017
• Quality: Minimize disruption to productivity
• Cost: Not spend more than $125,000

The scope of the project is defined as: 'the totality of the outputs, outcomes, and benefits and the work required to produce them'.

This can change over time, and it is the project manager's responsibility to ensure the project will still deliver its defined benefits. Consequently, a project manager must maintain focus on the relative priorities of time, cost, and quality with reference to the scope of the project.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines project management in the following way:

'Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to meet project requirements.'

This definition begs the question 'Exactly what knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques will I need to successfully manage a project?' In order to answer this question, it is helpful to look at project management from three different perspectives.

1. How the project fits into the organization - This refers to both the project and the individuals who will be involved in it, including how their responsibilities are defined and how they interact with each other.

2. How the project will evolve over time - This is referred to as the project life cycle and is the chronological sequence of activities that need to happen in order to deliver the project. Whatever their differences, all projects will by definition share a similar life cycle; they will all have a beginning, middle, and an end.

3. What skills are required to successfully manage the project - These are usually referred to as 'Project Functional Areas' because there are discrete areas within project management that can be considered in isolation even though they are interdependent.

This might sound unnecessarily complicated, but looking at a project from each of these three viewpoints will give you a much better understanding of the whole process than using any one of them individually.

To use an analogy: Imagine that a ship is traveling from London to New York.

The organizational perspective would be concerned with which members of the crew were responsible for doing what and how they communicated and interacted with each other.

The life cycle of the voyage would be concerned with where the ship was and what it was doing at any point from the beginning to the end of the journey.

The functional areas would be things like navigation, collision avoidance, routine maintenance, etc. Even though these activities would be taking place continuously and interdependently, it is still possible to think about them as discrete areas of knowledge.

This analogy is not perfect but it does illustrate that when you are studying a complex activity it can be helpful to look at it from a variety of perspectives in order to gain a better understanding of the whole.